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Thursday, September 20, 2012

Due to popular demand, we have just added one additional "Anthropomorphic Mouse Taxidermy Class" to the
month-long Morbid Anatomy Presents lineup at The Last Tuesday Society.

The new class will take place next Thursday, September 27th at 1:00 PM. No former taxidermy experience is
required, and you need bring nothing; you will leave with your own
taxidermied mouse set in a tableau, and the skills to create your own in
the future; past student projects can be seen by clicking here.
It must also be mentioned that Sue is a passionate and amazing teacher,
and we have had nothing but excellent feedback about her class.

Class size is limited to 15, and this class tends to sell out very quickly--the first two we announced are already sold out!--so if interested, I suggest you purchase tickets straight away. You can do so by clicking here. Hope very much to see you there!

Anthropomorphic
taxidermy–the practice of mounting and displaying taxidermied animals
as if they were humans or engaged in human activities–was a popular art
form during the Victorian and Edwardian eras. The best known
practitioner of the art form is British taxidermist Walter Potter who
displayed his pieces–which included such elaborate tableaux as The Death
of Cock Robin, The Kitten Wedding, and The Kitten Tea Party–in his own
museum of curiosities.

We invite you to join
taxidermist, tattoo artist and educator Susan Jeiven for a beginners
class in anthropomorphic taxidermy. All materials–including a mouse for
each student–will be provided, and each class member will leave at the
end of the day with their own anthropomorphic taxidermied mouse.
Students are invited to bring any miniature items with which they might
like to dress or decorate their new friend; some props and miniature
clothing will also be provided by the teacher. A wide variety of sizes
and colors of mice will be available.

No former taxidermy experience is required.

Also, some technical notes:

We use NO harsh or dangerous chemicals.

Everyone will be provided with gloves.

All animals are disease free.

Although there will not be a lot of blood or gore, a strong constitution is necessary; taxidermy is not for everyone.

All animals were already dead, nothing was killed for this class.
All mice used are feeder animals for snakes and lizards and would
literally be discarded if not sold.

I am very excited (and also slightly saddened) to announce the lineup for the final two weeks of programming of Morbid Anatomy Presents series at London's Last Tuesday Society.

Tonight--Thursday September 20th--please join us as veritable-force-of-nature Paul Craddock regales us with "A Most Unexpected History of Blood Transfusion." Next week, on Tuesday the 25th, we will host Wellcome Trust Research Fellow Dr. James Kennaway for "Bad Vibrations: The History of the idea of Music as a Disease." The following night Pat Morris--Observatory favorite and author of the book on anthropomorphic taxidermist Walter Potter--will be lecturing on "extreme" (read: human and monumental) taxidermy. The next night, Strange Attractor's Mark Pilkington will tell the tale of "Royal Raymond Rife and his Oscillating Beam Ray." On Sunday the 30th, wax artist and good friend Eleanor Crook will discuss plastic surgery of the world wars, and, finally, we have Sue Jeiven with her über-popular anthropomorphic taxidermy classes on the afternoons of Thursday the 27, Saturday the 29th, and Sunday the 30th.

Those living in Britain (who owned a television set) about ten
years ago might remember Sean Bean before he became a famous movie star.
Apart from his appearance in Sharpe, he starred in a television
advertisement for the National Blood Foundation, prompting people in his
thick Yorkshire accent to ‘do something amazing today’; ’save a life’
by giving blood. The foundation’s message is still the same, though Sean
Bean has moved onto other projects such as Lord of the Rings. In any
case, this illustrated lecture is about just that: the transfusion of
blood and its many meanings. But it focuses on a much earlier (and
stranger) period of transfusion history when saving a life was only one
reason to transfuse blood - from the sixteenth century to the
nineteenth.

The association between blood and life is a very easy one to
make and seems to span all cultures and time periods, as does the very
idea of swapping blood from one person to another. But what it means to
swap one being’s blood with another’s - and why this might be attempted -
has radically changed. It is only very recently, (around the turn of
the twentieth century), that blood was transfused in order to
purposefully replace lost blood. For the majority of this history, this
was most certainly not the case. In the seventeenth century,
transfusions of lamb’s blood were made to calm mad patients and, in the
nineteenth century, blood was transfused in order to restore a portion
of an invisible living principle living inside of it. This lecture
explores from where these ideas came and the ways in which bits of them
might linger in our own ideas of transfusion.

Paul Craddock is currently writing on pre-20th century transplant
surgery and transfusion at the London Consortium working under Prof.
Steven Connor (University of London) and Prof. Holly Tucker (Vanderbilt
University, Nashville). After four years studying music and performing
arts, living in rural China, and working for the National Health
Service, Paul made the switch to cultural and medical history. He has
never had a transplant and never received a transfusion - his interest
in these procedures come from thinking about generally how we relate to
the material world by making bodily transactions. He has lectured in the
UK, Europe, and the USA

Despite most people believing music to have beneficial and even
healing properties, Dr Kennaway's research shows a darker side to the
art. For the last two hundred years many doctors, critics, and writers
have suggested that certain kinds of music have the power to cause
neurosis, madness, hysteria, and even death. Dr Kennaway explores the
claims: is it true that Wagner's compositions make listeners feel
homosexual urges? Was Patty Hearst really brainwashed into robbing banks
by loud rock music? And does the US Army really play Metallica's 'Enter
Sandman' as a form of torture?

Dr James Kennaway is a Wellcome Trust Research Fellow at the
Centre for the History of Medicine and Disease at Durham University. He
studied at LSE and the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine
before completing a Master's at King's College, London and a PhD at UCLA
in 2004. Since then he has worked at the University of Vienna, Stanford
University and the Viadrina University in Frankfurt-an-der-Oder,
Germany. In January 2009 he began a Wellcome Research Fellowship at the
University of Durham.

After his highly acclaimed general lectures on the history of
taxidermy Pat Morris will return to talk in more detail about two areas
of special interest. Preserving a full-sized elephant represents the
'Mount Everest' of taxidermy. It is a challenge not only to the
taxidermist's artistry (in attempting to make an accurate representation
of the living animal) but it is also a serious engineering problem to
handle such a large and heavy item. Taxidermy methods can be applied to
humans, but our species is rarely preserved in this way and very few
'stuffed' humans exist. Even the suggestion that people might be preserved like this is abhorrent
to many, and the results of attempting the task can cause extreme
controversy. Come and hear more and perhaps debate some of the ethical
issues that arise".

Dr. Pat Morris is a retired staff member of Royal Holloway
College (University of London), where he taught biology undergraduates
and supervised research on mammal ecology. In that capacity he has
published many books and scientific papers and featured regularly in
radio and TV broadcasts. The history of taxidermy has been a lifelong
hobby interest and he has published academic papers and several books on
the subject. With his wife Mary he has travelled widely, including most
of Europe and the USA, seeking interesting taxidermy specimens and
stories. They live in England where their house is home to the largest
collection and archive of
historical taxidermy in Britain.

In the early 1930s, Dr Royal Raymond Rife, an American optics
engineer, claimed to be achieving theoretically impossible optical
magnifications of over 30,000 times - 10 times more powerful than
today's best microscopes.

Soon after, Rife announced that he could destroy bacteria by
blasting them with electromagnetic waves oscillating at frequencies
specific to each target organism. According to his supporters, Rife
cured significant numbers of people infected with a number of common but
dangerous infections, including typhoid, salmonella and influenza. But
his most controversial claim was that his device could kill the
virus-like organisms, which he dubbed "BX", responsible for cancer. Rife
and his team claimed to have cured 15 "hopeless" cancer patients after
60 days' treatment.

Rife's ray tube system was installed in several clinics and his
results were corroborated by numerous scientists and doctors. In 1939
he was invited to address the Royal Society of Medicine, which had also
approved his findings, and he subsequently formed the Rife Ray Beam Tube
Corporation, to build models for hospitals and clinics.

But with the death of one of his key supporters, Rife found
himself under sudden and prolonged assault from the American Medical
Association, who banned use of his beam ray to treat patients. Within a
year the dream was over, Rife a broken man. To this day it remains
unclear why the AMA turned on Rife, a pharmaceutical conspiracy being an
obvious, if paranoid conclusion.

Mark Pilkington is a writer, publisher, curator and
musician with particular interest in the fringes of knowledge, culture
and belief. Mark runs Strange Attractor Press and his writing has also
been published in numerous magazines and anthologies, including The
Anomalist, Fortean Times, Frieze, Sight & Sound, The Wire, the Time
Out Book of London Walks Vol.2 and London Noir.

The rifles used in the First World War fired low-velocity
bullets that were sufficient to cause tissue damage, splinter bone, and
tear away flesh, but unlike high-velocity bullets, would not cause the
energy waves that result in instant
death. As a result many young men survived the war with appalling facial injuries.

Independently, surgeons in France (Morestin), England (Gillies),
and Germany (Esser), began to develop techniques and procedures to
reconstruct the face. These included methods of moving skin and tissue
from one place to another and replacing and building up tissue where it
had been lost or damaged. The repair and reconstruction of damaged
tissue was also applied to limb injuries and burns.

During the Second World War, Harold Gillies and Archibald
McIndoe established a specialized plastic surgery unit at East Grinstead
Hospital, to treat injured servicemen and civilians. Their work on the
faces and hands of burnt airmen marked a significant advance in medicine
that was accompanied by other enormous advances, such as the ability to transplant the
cornea and restore sight. The so-called ‘Guinea Pig Club’ still exists
today, and a dwindling number of surviving Royal Air Force pilots attest
to the remarkable skills of these early pioneers.

Eleanor Crook trained in sculpture at Central St Martins
and the Royal Academy and makes figures and effigies in wax, carved wood
and lifelike media. She has also made a special study of anatomy and
has sculpted anatomical and pathological waxworks for the Gordon Museum
of Pathology at Guy's Hospital, London's Science Museum, and the Royal
College of Surgeons of England. She exhibits internationally in both
fine art and science museum contexts. She learned the technique of
forensic facial reconstruction modelling from Richard Neave and has
demonstrated and taught this to artists, forensic anthropology students,
law enforcement officers and plastic surgeons as well as incorporating
this practice in her own sculpted people. Eleanor is artist in residence
at the Gordon Museum of Pathology, a member of the Medical Artists'
Association, runs a course in Anatomy drawing at the Royal College of
Art and lectures on the M. A. Art & Science course at Central St
Martins School of Art in London.

Anthropomorphic taxidermy–the practice of mounting and displaying
taxidermied animals as if they were humans or engaged in human
activities–was a popular art form during the Victorian and Edwardian
eras. The best known practitioner of the art form is British taxidermist
Walter Potter who displayed his pieces–which included such elaborate
tableaux as The Death of Cock Robin, The Kitten Wedding, and The Kitten
Tea Party–in his own museum of curiosities.

We invite you to join taxidermist, tattoo artist and educator
Susan Jeiven for a beginners class in anthropomorphic taxidermy. All
materials–including a mouse for each student–will be provided, and each
class member will leave at the end of the day with their own
anthropomorphic taxidermied mouse. Students are invited to bring any
miniature items with which they might like to dress or decorate their
new friend; some props and miniature clothing will also be provided by
the teacher. A wide variety of sizes and colors of mice will be
available.

No former taxidermy experience is required.

Also, some technical notes:
• We use NO harsh or dangerous chemicals.
• Everyone will be provided with gloves.
• All animals are disease free.
• Although there will not be a lot of blood or gore, a strong constitution is necessary; taxidermy is not for everyone.
• All animals were already dead, nothing was killed for this class. All
mice used are feeder animals for snakes and lizards and would literally
be discarded if not sold.
• Please do not bring any dead animals with you to the class

Wednesday, September 19, 2012

This Saturday, September 22, will be one of your last chances to catch an unobstructed view of the exhibition "Ecstatic Raptures and Immaculate Corpses: Visions
of Death Made Beautiful in Italy" featuring my own photographs (some of which can be seen above) as well as waxworks by artists Eleanor Crook and Sigrid Sarda. All photographs and waxworks are also for sale.

The exhibition will be view at The Last Tuesday Society--11 Mare Street, London, E8 4RP--from noon until 7:00 PM. Also on view will be the wonderful collection of taxidermy, naturalia, erotica, books and curiosities which comprise the spectacular Last Tuesday Society Giftshop.

Well worth a trip, I promise! Full details follow; hope very much to see you there!

In
her many projects, ranging from photography to curation to writing, New
York based Joanna Ebenstein utilizes a combination of art and
scholarship to tease out the ways in which the pre-rational roots of
modernity are sublimated into ostensibly "purely rational" cultural
activities such as science and medicine.Much of her work uses this
approach to investigate historical moments or artifacts where art and
science, death and beauty, spectacle and edification, faith and
empiricism meet in ways that trouble contemporary categorical
expectations.In the exhibition "Ecstatic Raptures and Immaculate
Corpses" Ebenstein turns this approach to an examination of the uncanny
and powerfully resonant representations of the dead, martyred, and
anatomized body in Italy, monuments to humankind's quest to eternally
preserve the corporeal body and defeat death in arenas sacred and
profane.The artifacts she finds in both the churches, charnel houeses
and anatomical museums of Italy complicate our ideas of the proper
roles of--and divisions between--science and religion, death and beauty;
art and science; eros and thanatos; sacred and profane; body and soul.

In
this exhibition, you will be introduced to tantalizing visions of death
made beautiful, uncanny monuments to the human dream of life eternal.
You will meet "Blessed Ismelda Lambertini," an adolescent who fell into a
fatal swoon of overwhelming joy at the moment of her first communion
with Jesus Christ, now commemorated in a chillingly beautiful wax effigy
in a Bolognese church; The Slashed Beauty, swooning with a grace at
once spiritual and worldly as she makes a solemn offering of her
immaculate viscera; Saint Vittoria, with slashed neck and golden
ringlets, her waxen form reliquary to her own powerful bones; and the
magnificent and troubling Anatomical Venuses, rapturously ecstatic
life-sized wax women reclining voluptuously on silk and velvet cushions,
asleep in their crystal coffins, awaiting animation by inquisitive
hands eager to dissect them into their dozens of demountable, exactingly
anatomically correct, wax parts.

Joanna Ebenstein: New York based visual artist and independent scholar Joanna Ebenstein runs the popular Morbid Anatomy Blog and the related Morbid Anatomy Library, where her privately held collection of books, art, artifacts, and curiosities are made available by appointment.

For the past 5 years, she has traveled the world, seeking out the most
curious, obscure and macabre collections, public and private, front
stage and back, and sharing her findings via her the Morbid Anatomy Blog
as well as a variety of exhibitions including Anatomical Theatre, a photographic survey of artifacts of great medical museums of the Western World; The Secret Museum, a photographic exhibition exploring the poetics of collections private and public, front stage and back.

She is the founding member of Observatory--a gallery and lecture space in Brooklyn, New York--and annual co-curator of The Congress for Curious Peoples,
a 10-day series of lectures and performances investigating curiosity
and curiosities, broadly considered and taking place at the Coney Island
Museum.

Her work has been shown and published internationally, and she has lectured at museums and conferences around the world.

You can find out more about the show here, and view more images by clicking here.

Tuesday, September 18, 2012

A very sad announcement: the field trip to, and lecture at, St. Barts Pathology Museum organized as part of my one month residency at The Last Tuesday Society in London--originally scheduled to take place tomorrow, Wednesday September 19 at 7:00 PM--has been cancelled, due to circumstances beyond my control. Apologies to all! And hope to see you at one of these other wonderful upcoming events:

Wednesday, September 12, 2012

... How does [starlett Emma Stone's] obsession with mortality and death manifest itself? "By going to places like the Morbid Anatomy Library [in Brooklyn, New York] the other day, looking at little foetal pigs in jars. I have an interest in death. Obviously not constantly, but on a daily basis.

"There's an awareness of mortality, I think, that makes you live much more presently. There's something oddly comforting about death. Not dying. Dying, I'm terrified of, but death -" She pauses. "Sorry, am I getting really serious? Come on, we're in Cancun!"

A few months back, the Morbid Anatomy Library was graced with a visit by lovely, young and--apparently--morbidly inclined starlett Emma Stone, star of Easy A, Crazy, Stupid, Love, The Help and, most recently, The Amazing Spiderman. She was trailed on this wine-soaked visit by reporter Alexa Chung of Vogue UK, and we spent a lovely rainy hour or two paging through some of my favorite books, poking around the taxidermy collection, and discussing our shared love for the macabre. The trip resulted not only in the expected article for Vogue UK--entitled "The Crazy Cool of Emma Stone," in the August 2012 issue--but also the piece from the Herlad Scotland quoted above.

You can read the entire Vogue UK article--in which you will learn more about Stone's favorite books and artifacts in the collection, among other things--by clicking here, and the entire Herald Scotland piece by clicking here. Thanks so much to Jo Hanks for stumbling across the article, and for the donation of her very own issue of Vogue UK to this worthy cause! And thanks to good friend Eric Huang for alerting me.

Also, please feel free to come visit the library and see the collection for yourself during our next set of open hours this Saturday, September 15th, from 1-6. Details and directions here.

Tonight we will be hosting a screening and chat with Ronni Thomas, the mastermind behind The Midnight Archive (see above)--a web video series inspired by the exotic folk who revolve around the Observatory gallery space in Brooklyn; Mr. Thomas will joined be the series' music director and Real Tuesday Weld frontsman Stephen Coates. The following night, Tuesday, Martin Clayton--Senior Curator of Prints and Drawings at The Royal Collection, Windsor Castle--will be speaking about the material explored in his exhibition "Leonardo--Anatomist, the largest-ever exhibition of Leonardo da Vinci's anatomical work, on view now through October 7 at Windsor Castle. On Wednesday, we will learn about the belief-defying death themed nightclubs which dotted the geography of fin de siècle Paris, such as the Cabaret du Néant (Tavern of the Dead) and Cabaret de L’Enfer, with Vadim Kosmos, gallery director for Viktor Wynd Fine Arts.

An odd year ago - based on a series of lectures and events at
the Brooklyn Observatory, filmmaker Ronni Thomas was inspired to
document some of the institutions most unique and esoteric subjects and
topics. Director and lecturer Ronni Thomas will present and discuss and
screen some of his most memorable episodes as well as display some
artifacts collected from the filming experience (including a hands on
look at his private collection of diableries - 3d tissues of satan's
daily life in hell). A soundtrack for the evening will be provided by
Series composer and The Real Tuesday Weld frontman Stephen Coates.

Leonardo da Vinci is the archetype of the
Renaissance man, but since his day he has been seen primarily as a
painter who dabbled in the sciences. Leonardo would not have recognized
this image: his scientific studies were as important to him as his art.
Of all his investigations — which included optics, geology, botany and
hydrodynamics — the field that engaged him most was human anatomy.

In the winter of 1507–08, Leonardo witnessed the peaceful demise
of an old man in a hospital in Florence, and wrote in his notebook that
he performed a dissection “to see the cause of so sweet a death”. He
attributed it to a narrowing of the coronary vessels, and wrote the
first clear description of atherosclerosis in medical history. He also
described the pathology of cirrhosis of the man's liver, which he found
to be “desiccated and like congealed bran both in colour and substance”.

The dissection of the old man marked the beginning of five
years of intense anatomical investigation, and in 1510–11 Leonardo seems
to have collaborated with Marcantonio della Torre, the professor of
anatomy at the University of Pavia.

There is no sign that Leonardo attempted to collate his research
for publication, and although the anatomical studies were mentioned by
all Leonardo's early biographers, their dense and disorganized content
was barely comprehended. Unpublished, the studies were effectively lost
to the world.

The 150 surviving sheets of Leonardo's anatomical studies
reached England in the seventeenth century and eventually made it into
the Royal Collection, bound into an album with 450 of his more artistic
drawings. But it was not until 1900 that they were finally published and
understood. By then, their power to affect the progress of anatomical
knowledge had long passed.

Martin Clayton is Senior Curator of Prints and Drawings at The Royal Library, The Royal Collection, Windsor Castle.

While we may all have seen Eugène Atget’s 1898 famous photograph
of Cabaret de L’Enfer’s façade at 53 boulevard de Clichy, with its
malevolent maw threatening to devour all who dared to step within its
damnable interior. But how did this most macabre of cafés originate and
what went on within? Tonight’s talk will illuminate the origins of Fin
de Siecle Paris’ craze for morbid drinking dens including L’Enfer’s less
well known, but no less sinister, sister establishments; Le Ciel,
Neants and Truands.

Born in Istanbul of Ukrainian/French heritage – Screen
writer, DJ and authority on French popular culture Vadim Kosmos is the
Store manager of the Last Tuesday Society/‘Viktor Wynd’s Little Shop of
Horrors’ and Gallery director for Viktor Wynd Fine Arts.

Sunday, September 9, 2012

I am so very very excited to announce that Sue Jeiven's is bringing her wonderful and ubiquitously sold out Observatory "Anthropomorphic Mouse Taxidermy Class" to the London as part of my month-long Morbid Anatomy Presents lineup at The Last Tuesday Society.

There will be two iterations of the class, one on Saturday the 29th and one on Sunday the 30th of September. No former taxidermy experience is required, and you need bring nothing; you will leave with your own taxidermied mouse set in a tableau, and the skills to create your own in the future; past student projects can be seen by clicking here. It must also be mentioned that Sue is a passionate and amazing teacher, and we have had nothing but excellent feedback about her class.

Class size is limited to 15, and, at least in Brooklyn, this class tends to sell out very quickly, so if interested, I suggest you purchase tickets straight away.

For the Brits among you, you might want to check out this writeup about the Brooklyn iteration of the class in--yes, you guessed it--The Daily Mail, from which the classroom photos above were drawn. You can also watch a brief featurette on Sue and her work in the episode of The Midnight Archive above.

Full details for the class follow; you can purchase tickets by clicking here. Hope very much to see you there!

Anthropomorphic taxidermy–the practice of mounting and displaying taxidermied animals as if they were humans or engaged in human activities–was a popular art form during the Victorian and Edwardian eras. The best known practitioner of the art form is British taxidermist Walter Potter who displayed his pieces–which included such elaborate tableaux as The Death of Cock Robin, The Kitten Wedding, and The Kitten Tea Party–in his own museum of curiosities.

We invite you to join taxidermist, tattoo artist and educator Susan Jeiven for a beginners class in anthropomorphic taxidermy. All materials–including a mouse for each student–will be provided, and each class member will leave at the end of the day with their own anthropomorphic taxidermied mouse. Students are invited to bring any miniature items with which they might like to dress or decorate their new friend; some props and miniature clothing will also be provided by the teacher. A wide variety of sizes and colors of mice will be available.

No former taxidermy experience is required.

Also, some technical notes:

We use NO harsh or dangerous chemicals.

Everyone will be provided with gloves.

All animals are disease free.

Although there will not be a lot of blood or gore, a strong constitution is necessary; taxidermy is not for everyone.

All animals were already dead, nothing was killed for this class. All mice used are feeder animals for snakes and lizards and would literally be discarded if not sold.

Friday, September 7, 2012

This weekend--Saturday September 8th and Sunday September 9th--the Morbid Anatomy Library (seen above) will be open from 11-7 as part of the Brooklyn Museum's Go Open Studio Project. So please stop by for a perusal of the stacks, a turn through the drawers, and a conversation with the lovely and very clever
Morbid Anatomy Library interns Kelsey Kephart and Dru Munsell.

The Morbid Anatomy Library is located at 543 Union Street at Nevins, Brooklyn, buzzer 1E. To view a map, click here. To For more about the Morbid Anatomy Library and for directions and other such information, click here. For more about the Go Open Studio Project--and to see a full list of participating artists--click here.

Wednesday, September 5, 2012

This Saturday, September 8, you are cordially invited to join myself and a host of distinguished scholars, makers, and museum folk as we investigate, via a one day symposium termed "The Congress for Curious Peoples," some of the provocative intersections explored in the exhibition "Ecstatic Raptures and Immaculate Corpses: Visions of Death Made Beautiful in Italy," on view at the London-based Last Tuesday Society until the end of the month.

This first ever UK edition of The Congress for Curious Peoples will feature participants from The Wellcome Collection, The Wellcome Library, and The Gordon Museum of Pathology, as well as some of my very favorite artists, thinkers and scholars, and will take on such heady topics as enchantment and enlightenment, or the
sublimation of the magical into the rational world; the secret life of
objects, or the non-rational allure of objects and the psychology of
collecting; and beautiful death and incorruptible bodies, or the shared
drive to immortalize the human body and aestheticize death in both
medicine and Catholicism, and will

Tuesday, September 4, 2012

This Thursday, if you are in London or environs, please join Morbid Anatomy and The Last Tuesday Society for a free and gin-drenched opening party for my new exhibition "Ecstatic Raptures and Immaculate Corpses: Visions of Death Made Beautiful in Italy"! Full details follow. Hope very much to see you there!

In
her many projects, ranging from photography to curation to writing, New
York based Joanna Ebenstein utilizes a combination of art and
scholarship to tease out the ways in which the pre-rational roots of
modernity are sublimated into ostensibly "purely rational" cultural
activities such as science and medicine.Much of her work uses this
approach to investigate historical moments or artifacts where art and
science, death and beauty, spectacle and edification, faith and
empiricism meet in ways that trouble contemporary categorical
expectations.In the exhibition "Ecstatic Raptures and Immaculate
Corpses" Ebenstein turns this approach to an examination of the uncanny
and powerfully resonant representations of the dead, martyred, and
anatomized body in Italy, monuments to humankind's quest to eternally
preserve the corporeal body and defeat death in arenas sacred and
profane.The artifacts she finds in both the churches, charnel houeses
and anatomical museums of Italy complicate our ideas of the proper
roles of--and divisions between--science and religion, death and beauty;
art and science; eros and thanatos; sacred and profane; body and soul.

In
this exhibition, you will be introduced to tantalizing visions of death
made beautiful, uncanny monuments to the human dream of life eternal.
You will meet "Blessed Ismelda Lambertini," an adolescent who fell into a
fatal swoon of overwhelming joy at the moment of her first communion
with Jesus Christ, now commemorated in a chillingly beautiful wax effigy
in a Bolognese church; The Slashed Beauty, swooning with a grace at
once spiritual and worldly as she makes a solemn offering of her
immaculate viscera; Saint Vittoria, with slashed neck and golden
ringlets, her waxen form reliquary to her own powerful bones; and the
magnificent and troubling Anatomical Venuses, rapturously ecstatic
life-sized wax women reclining voluptuously on silk and velvet cushions,
asleep in their crystal coffins, awaiting animation by inquisitive
hands eager to dissect them into their dozens of demountable, exactingly
anatomically correct, wax parts.

You can find out more about the show here, and view more images by clicking here.

I have just been alerted to two fabulous looking death and culture conferences both of which are now soliciting papers! Full info for each follows. Apply away!

1) Art and Death: A Series of Three Workshops1 November 2012, 21 February and 23 May 2013
The Courtauld Institute of Art, Somerset House, Strand, London WC2R 0RN

Call for Papers
Submission by 20 September 2012 for workshop 1 (1 November 2012): Anticipation and Preparation

A series of three workshops will be held at the Courtauld Institute of Art in 2012-2013 to explore the inter-relationship between art and death. These workshops have arisen from an informal group of doctoral students with shared interests in funerary monuments. The workshops will be structured to recognize that the certainty of death is accompanied by the foreknowledge and uncertainty of what may come after, and that visual representations of these phases have varied over time and between countries. The first workshop will focus on the images and objects related to the impact that the certainty of death has on individuals and the community; the second on art in the context of dying, death and burial; and the final one on representations of the perceived fate of body and soul after death, as well as the continuation of a relationship (if only in memory) between the living and the dead.

Subjects for the workshops could include, but are not limited to:

Workshop 1 (1 November 2012): Anticipation and Preparation
• Death insurance? Religious gifts and foundations
• Protective objects and amulets
• Tombs commissioned during a lifetime, testamentary desire and fulfilment
• Contemplating images of death, warnings to the living
• The cult of the macabre, images of illness and decay
• Apocalyptic visions

Workshop 3 (23 May 2013) Life after Death
• Images of the soul /resurrected or re-incarnated body
• Depictions of the afterlife
• The incorruptible body, saints, relics and reliquaries
• Remembering the dead, commemoration in art and/or performance
• The ‘immortality’ of the artist, post-mortem reputations

Format and Logistics:
• Length of paper: 20 minutes
• Four papers per workshop
• Location: Research Forum, The Courtauld Institute of Art
• Timing: 10am-midday
• Expenses: funds are not available to cover participants’ expenses

We welcome proposals relating to all periods, media and regions (including non-European) and see this as an opportunity for doctoral and early post-doctoral students to share their research.

• 20 September 2012 for workshop 1 (1 November 2012): Anticipation and Preparation
• 10 January 2013 for workshop 2 (21 February 2013): Death and Dying
• 11 April 2013 for workshop 3 (23 May 2013): Life after Death

For planning purposes, it would be helpful to have an indication of interest in the later workshops, in advance of submission of a proposal.

Organised by Jessica Barker and Ann Adams (The Courtauld Institute of Art)

2) Graduate Student Conference: “Death: the Cultural Meaning of the End of Life”
January 24–25, 2013
LUCAS (Leiden University Centre for Arts in Society)

This conference aims to explore how death has been represented and conceptualized, from classical antiquity to the modern age, and the extent to which our perceptions and understandings of death have changed (or remained the same) over time. The wide scope of this theme reflects the historical range of LUCAS’s (previously called LUICD) three research programs (Classics and Classical Civilization, Medieval and Early Modern Studies and Modern and Contemporary Studies), as well as the intercontinental and interdisciplinary focus of many of the institute’s research projects.

The LUCAS Graduate Conference welcomes papers from all disciplines within the humanities. The topic of your proposal may address the concept of death from a cultural, historical, classical, artistic, literary, cinematic, political, economic, or social viewpoint.

Questions that might be raised include: How have different cultures imagined the end of life? What is the role of art (literature, or cinema) in cultural conceptions of death? How might historical or contemporary conceptualizations of death be related to the construction of our subjectivity and cultural identity? What is the cultural meaning(s) of death? To what extent has modern warfare changed our perceptions of death? How is death presented in the media and how has this changed? In what ways has religion influenced our reflections on death and the afterlife?

In this special edition of Liars’ League, actors from the live
fiction salon perform stories of addiction, healing and the history of
medicine by Rose Tremain and Suzanne Rivecca, as featured in Granta 120:
Medicine. Then, writer and broadcaster Colin Grant (Bageye at the
Wheel, I & I: Marley, Tosh and Wailer), in conversation with a
Granta editor, tells how he pursued and then quit medical school and
reads from his new autobiographical novel extracted in granta.com.

Admission price includes a copy of "Granta 120: Medicine and Hendrick's Gin and Tonic."------------------------------------------------------------------------------

When Robert Marbury was 19 years old, he necked with Ricki Lake
on camera. At age 29, he spent a year sailing in Indonesia, where he
says his ship was attacked by pirates.Four years later, he was one of
the three co-founders of the Minnesota Association of Rogue
Taxidermists.

Known as a vegan taxidermist, Robert Marbury documents the
existence of little known wild and feral plush animals inhabiting our
urban environments. With tongue firmly in cheek, through his Urban
Beast Project, Marbury hopes to garner attention and general concern for
the plight of such strange creatures. As he describes on his webpage:
while most of the Urban Beasts exhibited on his site "have met the end
of their species, it is our hope that with exposure and attention many
other Beasts will be saved."

Tonight's talk will touch on image sharing, legal limitations,
collecting, renewed interest in gaff and travel taxidermy as well as
death and the impulse to make contact.

Robert Marbury is an artist from Baltimore Maryland. He is the Director and co-Founder of the Minnesota Association of Rogue Taxidermists. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Wednesday 5th September 2012Dr Sam Alberti of The Hunterian Museum on the History of Medical Museums Doors at 6 pm, Talk commences at 7 pm In the first comprehensive study of
nineteenth-century medical museums, Morbid Curiosities traces the
afterlives of diseased body parts. It asks how they came to be in
museums, what happened to them there, and who used them. This book is
concerned with the macabre work of pathologists as they dismembered
corpses and preserved them: transforming bodies into material culture.
The fragmented body parts followed complex paths - harvested from
hospital wards, given to one of many prestigious institutions, or
dispersed at auction. Human remains acquired new meanings as they were
exchanged and were then reintegrated into museums as physical maps of
disease. On shelves curators juxtaposed organic remains with paintings,
photographs, and models, and rendered them legible with extensive
catalogues that were intended to standardize the museum experience. And
yet visitors refused to be policed, responding equally with wonder and
disgust. Morbid Curiosities is a history of the material culture of
medical knowledge in the age of museums.

Sam Alberti is Director of Museums and Archives at the Royal College of Surgeons of England, which includes the renowned Hunterian Museum. He is interested in the past, present and future of medical and natural history collections. His books include Nature and Culture: Objects, Disciplines and the Manchester Museum (2009), The Afterlives of Animals: A Museum Menagerie (2011) and Morbid Curiosities: Medical Museums in Nineteenth-Century Britain (2011).------------------------------------------------------------------------------

In this exhibition, you will be introduced to tantalizing
visions of death made beautiful, uncanny monuments to the human dream of
life eternal. You will meet "Blessed Ismelda Lambertini," an adolescent
who fell into a fatal swoon of overwhelming joy at the moment of her
first communion with Jesus Christ, now commemorated in a chillingly
beautiful wax effigy in a Bolognese church; The Slashed Beauty, swooning
with a grace at once spiritual and worldly as she makes a solemn
offering of her immaculate viscera; Saint Vittoria, with slashed neck
and golden ringlets, her waxen form reliquary to her own powerful bones;
and the magnificent and troubling Anatomical Venuses, rapturously
ecstatic life-sized wax women reclining voluptuously on silk and velvet
cushions, asleep in their crystal coffins, awaiting animation by
inquisitive hands eager to dissect them into their dozens of
demountable, exactingly anatomically correct, wax parts.

Saturday 8th September'Congress for Curious People' One-Day Seminar - London Edition
11am - 5:30 pm
A
one day symposium featuring a host of scholars, writers, and
practitioners exploring in panels, illustrated lectures and discussion
the intersections explored by the exhibition "Ecstatic Raptures and Immaculate Corpses: Visions of Death Made Beautiful in Italy."
Themes discussed will include enchantment and enlightenment, or the
sublimation of the magical into the rational world; the secret life of
objects, or the non-rational allure of objects and the psychology of
collecting; and beautiful death and incorruptible bodies, or the shared
drive to immortalize the human body and aestheticize death in both
medicine and Catholicism.

3:00-5:30 Beautiful Death and Incorruptible Bodies: Eternal Life and aestheticized death in medicine and Catholicism
(15 minute presentations followed by moderated discussion)
Moderated by John Troyer, Center for Death and Society, University of Bath
• Eleanor Crook, Wax artist
• John Troyer, Center for Death and Society, University of Bath
• Gemma Angel, PhD Student ad UCL History of Art
• Anna Maerker, Model Experts: Wax Anatomies and Enlightenment in Florence and Vienna, 1775–1815
• Simon Chaplin, Wellcome Library
• Sigrid Sarda, Wax artist
• William Edwards, The Gordon Museum

The piece is described on the museum website thusly: "The agony of a young woman is represented in her last instant of life as she abandons herself to death voluptuously and completely naked. The thorax and abdomen can be opened, allowing the various parts to be disassembled so as to simulate the act of anatomic dissection."